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GELFAND’S WORLD - In his first month as the newly elected president, Donald Trump is off to a rocky but predictable start. His first several appointments include the child molester as Attorney General, the drunken woman molester as Secretary of Defense, and a second string of potential appointees (Ron DeSantis, anyone?) who combine cultism (support of Trump) with worse cultism (supporting anti-vaccine crackpots). And then there is the guy who is the potential nominee as FBI chief who has promised to do what he can to undo what the FBI is actually supposed to do.
I would hazard a guess that the wholesale creation of chaos and the destruction of otherwise respectable government agencies is not what traditional conservatism is supposed to be about. And I would also hazard a guess that it is not what that 2% of Americans who shifted to Trump in the last election thought they were buying into.
Well, it's too late and too bad, but you broke it, you bought it, and now you own it.
I'm still waiting for the Democratic leadership to point out the predictable result of the promised Trump tariff plan. It's not just that import tariffs will trickle down as price increases in the supermarket, the car lot, and the hardware store. The result of such actions is to cause people to spend less, and this is the prescription for creating a recession.
Back in the pre-Reagan days, there was this concept called supply side economics, as put forth by Arthur Laffer, among others. Interestingly, the book on the subject, called The Way the World Works, was written by a fellow named Jude Wanniski, and Wanniski had a lot to say about the danger of tariffs. In particular, he tried to attribute the Great Depression to the effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. This may have been a bit of over-interpretation, but it is generally accepted that the tariff made the depression worse.
The idea in economics is that anything that slows down buying (and therefore selling) is a drag on demand, and when demand falls, the economy slows down. In other words, artificial drags on demand are recessionary.
What's also interesting is that even the threat of such a drag on demand can begin to have recessionary effects. One way that we will see such effects is when other countries respond to the threat of U.S. tariffs by applying their own retaliatory sanctions. Hence the Chinese response, which is to threaten to limit exports of certain strategic metals (i.e.: things we need in our own manufacturing).
One other thought: Remember when the Covid pandemic created what we called "supply chain" shortfalls? The predictable result was shortages and increased prices on everything from toilet paper to canned vegetables. Well, the result of import tariffs is kind of analogous to those other supply chain shortages, isn't it? Whether it is due to the lack of ships and sailors or just adding an artificial price at the dock, the effect is to increase the costs of imports. Then a fall in overall demand.
Second Amendment activism in pursuit of social policy
It's hard not to agree with the passionate and outraged comments from one contributor to DailyKos, who chided readers for supporting -- in any way at all -- the murder of another human being. You can read it here.
Only a few hours later, a different Kos commenter offered a rather different point of view, a kind of "Well, I'm not in favor of murder but I can understand how someone who has lost a loved one due to the action of an insurance company could get upset."
Or something like that. Read it here if you like.
So let's consider the two questions. Is it OK for a health insurance company to deny the necessary treatment of a gravely ill human being? The problem is that this is the basis of the private part of the health insurance sector in this country. We've had the debate, and the lobbyists always win.
The other part of the question is whether we are a government of laws (don't shoot other people just because you are annoyed about something) rather than of our own impulses (it's OK to bend the law when the situation is extreme enough).
It's curious that in the first hours following the shooting, the vast majority of comments I saw on internet sites were almost totally along the assumption that the shooting was about the insurance company turning down somebody's treatment. The number of personal stories grew into the hundreds, and the discussion of the procedures used by the insurance companies was then discussed in detail.
And today, we are being told that the bullets were marked with the following words: "Deny, Depose, Defend."
You can read about it here. That article links these words to the description of how insurance companies operate to deny claims, as written by author Jay Feinman:
"The three words bear a striking resemblance to Jay Feinman’s book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
“Today the name of the game is delay, deny, defend: to improve their profits, insurance companies delay payment of justified claims, deny payment altogether, and defend their actions by forcing claimants to enter litigation,” the book’s blurb reads."
One other thought. The idea of the anguished father or husband who takes a hostage to get his kid the operation she needs is one of the older television plots. I've seen it at least half a dozen times. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to get rid of such issues, but we seem to have a way to go.
One other observation. In one of those internet discussion sites I was reading yesterday; a nurse contributed her own thoughts. She had worked for an insurance company in considering claims, and this included denying some of them. She advised people to be aware of the exclusions in their health insurance policies. I guess the idea is that when faced with that life threatening disease that could be helped by an expensive treatment, you should be respectful of the fine print, even though the insurance policy is what your employer offered you at the time, and you couldn't have gotten anything better for any money. In other words, that remark about "check your exclusions" is the most telling critique (however unintentional) of the American system that I have ever seen.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
